"I believe Russia is an opponent, I really do,” Biden said at a CNN town hall Thursday night. “I view China as a competitor, a serious competitor.”

see, and he's wrong; the russians are a paper enemy, that we continually create for our own devices.

this is one of the most insightful analyses in the history of the world:

Therefore it seeks in Russia the enemy it has lost in France, and appears to say to the universe, or to say to itself. "If nobody will be so kind as to become my foe, I shall need no more fleets nor armies, and shall be forced to reduce my taxes. The American war enabled me to double the taxes; the Dutch business to add more; the Nootka humbug gave me a pretext for raising three millions sterling more; but unless I can make an enemy of Russia the harvest from wars will end. I was the first to incite Turk against Russian, and now I hope to reap a fresh crop of taxes. - thomas paine, rights of man, 1791

and, nothing has changed - because the french revolution, as much of a failure as it was, aligned the newly bourgeois french with the long bourgeois english, and resulted in the entente cordiale.

but, the frontier merely moved east. the same economic forces remained at play.

and, the russians have only ever struggled with this; they really don't get it, they never did. that would seem stupid to them; unbelievable. & yet, it's true.

the last "reset" was really a trojan horse, and the british nearly seized moscow in the midst of putin's naive foolishness. nobody should expect them to repeat that mistake. so, if russia is an opponent, it's because we've insisted they must be, not because they want to be. and, there is a real possibility for peace there, if we decide we want it.

but, read that paine excerpt a second time.

and, a third.

get your head around it. truly.

the chinese are different - they are not competitors, they are an alien species, and they will never see us as anything more than a primitive subspecies of warring tribes that need to be civilized in their image. that can't end well, which is why it's so important to be so careful with them. we need to find that middle point between integration and defense - because, unlike the russians, the chinese will attack if they see an opening.

i remember lashing into trump for not getting it four years ago; many of his comments suggested he hadn't been properly briefed. you can't say that about biden...

what you can say is that he represents a segment of the ruling elite that legitimately has this backwards. and, if this is his foreign policy - play nice with china and get tough on russia - then it's both a recipe for disaster and a contradiction waiting to burst, as the chinese are the most likely opponents in a get-tough-on-russia strategy.

the smart generals should be able to figure out that the russians are always on the right side of history, and that, in the end, we will need them to defeat the chinese.